Propagandists working in film have often turned to animation in order to
express extremes of action and emotion without alienating audiences. Particularly
popular is cartoon animation, which draws on the longstanding tradition of political
caricature. The humorous tone and abstraction of 'cartoon reality' allows the artist
greater leeway to express opinions that might be guarded in plainer speech.

John The Bull makes use of the popular cartoon figure of John Bull to rouse
British anger at the importing of foreign meat. While the film is not overtly satirical
in intent, the scenes of meat carcasses being hung from the neck from lampposts, or
of baying mobs outside foreign butchers, would certainly have appeared a lot more
threatening and provocative in live-action than in cartoon form.

Through the 1930s, animators such as Walt Disney would devote ever-greater
energies into capturing natural movement and giving realistic anatomy to
animals, building up to groundbreaking films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(US, 1937). But such attention to detail takes time, and John the Bull,
like most other cartoons of the period, favours expressing the emotion of movements
over striving for a convincingly 'real' representation. The film also takes shortcuts by
'looping' certain actions, reusing the same sequences of drawings several times to save
time and money. Both traits were common in British and American animation,
and John The Bull is more ambitious in attempting perspective than many other
films of its time. The sparse line-drawing style would be similarly familiar to
contemporary audiences, as more detailed shading of characters and backgrounds
could be confusing in black and white.

The film was released on the cusp of the changeover between silent and sound
film, when projectors capable of playing synchronised soundtracks would not yet
be available at every venue. Because of this, both silent and sound versions
were released, the latter identical save for the addition of music and sound
effects: no voices were added and the textual intertitles were preserved.